


The Ice Age

by abundantlyqueer



Category: Lord of the Rings RPF
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-01-13
Updated: 2004-01-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 04:00:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/132613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/abundantlyqueer/pseuds/abundantlyqueer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p><br/>A/N: Takes place in <a href="http://crazybutsound.insanejournal.com/profile"><img/></a><a href="http://crazybutsound.insanejournal.com/"><strong>crazybutsound</strong></a>'s"London Calling" AU series. It sort of goes with <a href="http://community.livejournal.com/the_piazza">this</a>.</p><p>PS: I figure Orli and Dom have just turned twenty-one, Billy's twenty-nine, and Elijah's over fifteen and under sixteen.</p>
    </blockquote>





	1. Starlings

**Author's Note:**

>   
>  A/N: Takes place in [](http://crazybutsound.insanejournal.com/profile)[**crazybutsound**](http://crazybutsound.insanejournal.com/)'s"London Calling" AU series. It sort of goes with [this](http://community.livejournal.com/the_piazza).
> 
> PS: I figure Orli and Dom have just turned twenty-one, Billy's twenty-nine, and Elijah's over fifteen and under sixteen.

When Billy leaves the bookshop in the evening, there's no sign of Dom on the piazza. Billy's eyes flicker with the brief image of him hunkered patiently on Billy's doorstep, hands in his jacket pockets and head bent low against the cold and dark. Billy's pace quickens despite himself.

Elijah's still there. Billy saw him at lunchtime, careening wild circles around Dom, both arms out-stretched like skinny wings, while Dom dug through the trash and laughed at his antics. Now Elijah's at rest, he and Orli wrapped up in a single threadbare blanket, Elijah cross-legged between Orli's knees, leaning back against Orli's chest. Orli holds out a small cardboard box-lid with a few coins in it; he shuffles it to-and-fro in wordless request when anyone passes, but is resolutely ignored every time.

Billy knows he's staring, knows too the glance of black resentment he'll get from Orli if he's caught. But watching the other street kids is the counter-balance to ignoring Dom; Billy can't help himself.

Orli's rarely in evidence during the day, and Billy wonders what fragile thread of obligation or opportunity keeps him tethered to this routine. Despite the cold and the gathering darkness and the callous indifference of the passers-by, there's a kind of tranquility in Orli and Elijah's expressions, which sets them a little apart from the other kids, whose hard edged desperation begins to show more clearly as the light fails. Billy likes to think that Orli's daytime activities are profitable enough to buy them both some hair-fine margin of security that puts that look on their faces. The thought makes Billy feel unreasonably relieved; he worries about little Elijah in a way he can never allow himself to about Dom.

A businessman, resplendent in overcoat and scarf and leather gloves halts in front of Orli and Elijah. Billy's still too far away to hear, but close enough to see the man bend and catch Elijah's chin in his big black-clad fingers. Orli's 'no' is sharp enough to carry to Billy as Orli unfolds up onto his feet, shrugging the blanket back off his shoulders, talking fast.

The john releases Elijah, considering. He produces a thin fold of cash, extending it to Orli, but still looking at Elijah. Elijah, eyes huge and round and riveted on the money, eases onto his feet too. There's some fractional exchange between the two boys, and Orli pushes Elijah aside with the flat of his hand dead-center in Elijah's narrow chest.

Orli puts himself squarely in front of the john, who strips his right glove off impatiently and digs his fingers into Orli's left hip, hard enough that Orli has to shift to maintain his balance. Billy knows what he feels like – what Dom and Orli and Elijah and all the street kids feel like to the touch: bones too light and sharp under a layer of flesh that's too thin and skin that's too tight.

Something about Orli's thin frame and dully mistrustful glance pleases the buyer. He closes his hand around the tattered sleeve of Orli's army-surplus parka and jerks him forward, past Elijah. Orli shakes him off long enough to scoop up the discarded blanket and thrust it at Elijah. Elijah takes it, but he's arguing, looking from Orli to the punter and back again, appealing to them both. The man's smirking; Elijah looks terrified and determined in equal parts.

"I don't fuckin' care what you want," Orli growls at Elijah, Billy passing within fifteen-feet of them now. "I don't want you around you little fuck. Just fuck off and stay the fuck outta trouble, okay?" And then, to his buyer, "are we doin' this or what?"

They walk off together, side-by-side but not touching. Elijah's left clutching the blanket to his chest, the box-lid with its thirty-five pence abandoned at his feet. Impulsively Billy steps toward him. Elijah looks up, blind and bereft, and Billy realizes that it's fully night, and the streetlights are turning the tear-trails on Elijah's cheeks to gold. Elijah grabs up the coins out of the box-lid and takes flight in the opposite direction from the one taken by Orli and his punter.

Billy feels a stab of fear as he watches Elijah flee, his run all small boy's elbows and heels as he weaves among the trash bins and the benches and disappears into the dark. Billy finds himself praying – for the first time in years, with a real 'dear God' and an 'amen' – that Dom will be on his doorstep when he gets home.

 

When Billy gets home, Dom's not there, and the anxious nausea that's been gnawing at Billy's stomach turns into a small sharp spike of pain. Billy crams it back down, turning his key in the lock with just the precise combination of push and pull and press that it takes to soothe the badly fitting mechanism.

He showers, pulls on some clean clothes, and fixes himself something to eat. He sits in front of his plate and watches the food congeal. The radio's on, but the words and music won't turn into sense, and Billy can hardly hear them anyway over the sound of his own heartbeat in his eardrums.

He waits up, sitting in his couch that always smells a little odd, drinking innumerable cups of tea - or, rather, letting them grow stone cold as he cradles the cup in his hands. By one in the morning, he's standing at the window, staring into the street. A car passes every few minutes, but otherwise the night seems deserted and inhospitable. More than that: antagonistic. Billy can't think of anywhere out there in the yellow-stained dark that Dom could sanely choose in preference to Billy's flat, with its food and its shower and its decently warm bed.

Billy thinks about Elijah. When Billy asked, Dom told him Elijah was eighteen. Billy took it for granted that Dom was lying, but wondered by how much. On a good day Elijah looks thirteen. On a bad day, cold and wet and starved, when he's nothing but miserably huge eyes and pale face and poked out lower lip, he could pass for a tall ten-year old. Billy feels a sudden surge of panic, thinking about Elijah alone on the streets, without Orli. Anything could fuckin' happen to him. Billy actually turns away from the window, scanning the floor for his trainers, before he realizes there's no point. Where would he look? His only notion is to go back to the piazza, but it'll be deserted now, too well policed by night for the kids to get any rest there. Billy hardly knows London as it is, and he's pretty sure most born-and-bred Londoners wouldn't know where to look anyhow.

Then it occurs to Billy that Dom might be with Elijah, and Elijah's okay and Dom's okay even though he's not here. The thought, fragile as it is, is enough to let Billy lie down on his bed and close his eyes. Not enough to let him sleep, though.

Billy wakes cold and confused, his skin feeling faintly raw from sleeping fully dressed. There's a merciful moment of fogginess, and then his stomach plunges as he remembers last night. He sits up hastily, wiping his hand over his face. Right on top of the despair there's a sudden surge of relief as he realizes it's Sunday. Only three hours at the store and he'll be free to --

\-- he quashes that thought ruthlessly.

By noon, the unpromising morning has given way to a truly foul day: bitterly cold, with a knife thin wind and a steadily driving drizzle of semi-frozen rain. The piazza is almost deserted except for a scant population of shoppers going purposefully about their business. No time to spare for street performers or panhandlers today. Most of the kids are gone too, only the most desperate crouching in the feeble shelter of trash-bins or shop awnings.

Billy glances around, but there's no sign of Elijah or Orli or ... anyone.

Billy heads for the diner across the street and 'round the corner from the piazza. He's been there a few times; it's dirt-cheap and the food's no worse than you'd expect for the price. The kids hang out there a lot on bad days, crammed around the two tables farthest from the door, nursing empty coffee cups and larking like starving birds.

Billy pushes through the door, into the thick atmosphere of old grease and spiky new ketchup. The back tables are jammed all right, but before hope has a chance to catch hold of him, Billy's already ascertained that none of the kids is Elijah or Orli or Dom.

He almost misses them, and it's only forlorn hope that makes him glance around the rest of the place. They're sitting closer to the door, in the no-man's land between the street kids and the (low) paying customers. Billy recognizes the back of Dom's head -- dirty blond-streaked tips sticky with neglect -- and it feels like the ground has suddenly resolidified under his feet.

For a second Billy hesitates, trying to decide whether or not to approach them, and in that interval he makes the mistake of glancing at Orli and Elijah.

Orli's face is a fuckin' mess. He's done a brave clean-up job somewhere - maybe in the diner's filthy, cupboard-sized toilet - but even without the blood the damage is appalling. There's a raw graze on his forehead, and a bite - not a love bite, Billy realizes, but a real _bite_ complete with stone-bruised teeth-marks - on his left cheekbone. Both nostrils are rimmed black inside with congealed blood. The side of his mouth is red and swollen around the sharp black indent of a split lip. He's got purple marks under his eyes, and the rest of his skin looks paper-white and tissue-thin by comparison.

Billy wonders how much Orli's broken good looks were worth on the open market. Twenty quid? He'd like to think fifty, but he's not so sure. Orli strikes Billy as the type to drive a hard bargain and then give good value, but he's a street kid, jetsam; there's lots more where he came from, so it's always a buyer's market. In a year or two, maybe, the punters can have his dead body for free.

It's a sign of the weird slippage of perspective inside Billy's head that he suddenly notices the three scraped plates sitting on the table in front of them, and the still half-full monster mugs of milky tea. Elijah's wearing a thick-knit dark blue sweater that's five sizes too big on him, the ends of the sleeves folded back into bulky cuffs to display his gray fingerless gloves. He's red cheeked from the heat, but too proud of his new acquisitions to take any of them off. There's a bundle of faded black knit heaped on top of Orli's parka, slung on the back of the fourth chair at their table. The garments are all dull and fuzzy with age, fifty-pence bargains from the grab-bins at Oxfam no doubt.

Billy hopes Orli's being provident; whatever he made last night, it's going to have to last a while. Looking as he does now, the only tricks Orli's going to get are the ones who want to do as much and more to him while his injuries are still fresh, and his battered face makes him too conspicuous by far for theft by stealth.

The part that Billy can't get past is that they look -- they -- they look _happy_. Orli's broken face is soft with the satisfaction of knowing Elijah's provided for. Elijah's radiant with food and heat and delight that Orli's fond indulgence of him has stretched all the way to buying Dom food too, even though it's positively against the rules. Charity, or even compassion, is too dangerous a luxury for those who are already on the knife-edge of survival. The cant of Dom's head betrays the contentment of a full stomach and a bummed cigarette.

Orli sighs in weary satiety and slouches low in his seat to rest his head against Elijah's shoulder. Elijah lifts one fuzzy gray hand, his naked fingertips protruding blunt and pink and shockingly small, and pets gently at the water-and-blood stiffened curls at Orli's temple. Dom's leaning back in his chair, but one forearm trails across the table top, his grimy ink-stained fingers interwoven with Orli's.

Billy almost doubles over from the sudden surge inside his chest. Not jealousy, not resentment ... _shame_. If Orli will trade his body to be beaten and bitten and God knows what else for fifty quid -- if that -- then why wouldn't Dom trade submission to Billy's awkwardly fumbling gentleness in return for a sandwich and a shower and a bed?

Elijah looks up and sees Billy standing there. His forehead creases fractionally in confusion, and Billy understands that Elijah doesn't recognize him. Whatever tear-blurred outline of Billy Elijah caught under the streetlights last night, it's no clue to the man he sees today. Billy's face, no doubt, glitters in Elijah's vision with the reflected glory of food and clothes and Orli's fierce devotion.

Dom's head starts to turn, following Elijah's look, and before Billy sees more than the pink-rimmed shell of Dom's ear, he turns and bolts out the door into the rain and cold, down the gray slicked streets and across the piazza and away, just anywhere, _away_.


	2. The Ice Age

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>  Dedication: for [](http://crazybutsound.insanejournal.com/profile)[**crazybutsound**](http://crazybutsound.insanejournal.com/), for making such a complete and compelling universe.  
> 

_The ice age is coming, the sun is zooming in  
Engines stop running and the wheat is growing thin   
A nuclear error, but I have no fear   
London is drowning-and I live by the river._

The Clash: London Calling.

 _Orlando_

Orli has a regular gig with Ian from ten-thirty in the morning until one-thirty in the afternoon pretty much every Saturday, unless Ian's away or having a family-gathering or something. Orli gets thirty quid a go, which is an irresistible chunk of money all at once.

Ian's a very different animal from the other men who pay to use Orli. The punters who'll hand over two or three or four quid in return for three or four or five minutes of grunting and shoving and swearing against an alley wall are paying for an orifice, a fist or mouth or arse to stick their dicks into. Orli winces at the rasp of rough asphalt against the bones of his back or face or knees, and makes small breathless keening sounds that can be interpreted equally as pleasure or pain, as the punter's fancy strikes him. Orli's been fucked by men who couldn't say if he was fair or dark. When they're done and Orli has his money and he's cleaning up with a wad of toilet paper in the men's room of some pub (provided, of course, they'll let him in and there's any loo roll in the men's room anyway) Orli's always certain he's had the best end of the deal.

Ian – well, Ian buys some of the old push and pull too, of course, not like the pathetic old geezer who picks Orli up on occasion and gives him a couple of quid just to drop his jeans and boxers and let the old fart paw a bit, until Orli starts to get hard and the poor bastard gets to hold an erection, even if it's not his.

Ian may have the long refractory period of an older man, but he's also got forty years of experience, and endurance that Orli finds frankly unbelievable at times. Orli suspects Ian of slipping a Viagra now and then.

"Orlando, how nice," Ian always beams, as if Orli's appearance at his front door is a delightful surprise.

It's the cleanliness of everything that gets Orli every time. Ian wears white canvas tennis shoes and pale gray linen pants and a voluminous white cotton shirt, and his silver gray hair shines and his skin glows pinkly and his pale blue eyes are clear as glass. Orli goes upstairs, past gleaming mahogany and fresh flowers, into the guest bathroom. He sheds his grimy clothing in a heap on the white tiled floor and steps into the shower.

When Orli's scrubbed and shaved, hair toweled into damp ringlets, fingernails pared smooth, he walks naked into the guest bedroom, where Ian's reclining barefoot on the bed with the color-supplement of the Sunday Times.

"Ah, there you are," Ian smiles. "Ready?"

It's not a real question; there's no illusion of seduction in this. Ian is civilized and considerate, but it's not for Orli to acquiesce or refuse. He crawls onto the bed and stretches out on the cool crisp sheets.

The others are all about surfaces – spit and come on Orli's skin, fingernails scratching, hard palms and harder knuckles trying to break through but jarring to a halt on his bones. They shove into him, tongues and fingers and dicks, but the pain's sharpest right under the skin; contrary to what the punters might like to think, a cock, no matter how far it's thrust up Orli's arse, cannot reach his soul.

Ian's different. Orli's not sure Ian means to be different, or knows or cares that he's different, but he is. Ian, in pursuit of his own pleasure, inadvertently _digs_ into Orli.

Ian, thank God, is not one of those nightmare punters who fancies himself a sexual god, who knows what buttons to push and nerves to fret, and can drag a painfully sudden and utterly unpleasant orgasm from the most reluctant body. Orli hates those bastards – hates them for trying to get to him that way.

Ian just likes to feel silky young skin and dense young flesh under his hands, under his mouth. Ian likes to feel a smooth young cock swell and harden in his fist or in his mouth. Orli shudders and groans, letting the pounding of the blood in his veins drown out the noise in his head.

Ian loves to feel long sleek muscles and slender limbs trembling with pleasure. Ian loves the extravagant pliability of young joints, the way long limbs can be arranged to provide complete access, a perfect angle, powerful leverage. Ian loves how a young body instinctively responds to skillful stimulation, how with the right press and _push_ and a smear of lube a young body opens like a pliant flower. Ian loves to go slowly … very slowly.

Orli pillows his face on his own folded forearms, ass in the air, rocked forward a little with each gentle but inexorable thrust of Ian's cock into his hole. Ian's paper-soft hands pet and stroke Orli's balls, Orli's half-slack cock. Orli usually loses his erection once Ian starts fucking him – it's like the sensations washing over Orli are too weighty and too strange to produce such a mundane effect. Ian doesn't mind: he knows it's a common reaction, and besides, as long as Orli remains receptive and responsive, it's not Ian's problem.

Ian adores toys, nothing fancy, nothing that would detract from the simple immediacy of the situation. Orli kneeling in the midst of snowy sheets, fucking himself slowly and deeply on the dildo braced between his heels, pleases Ian immensely. Ian dictates the position, the pace, and the killing turn of the hip each time Orli grinds down. Orli's cock hardens again, and the hairless skin of his narrow chest flushes pink.

Orli has defenses. He has places in his mind that he can withdraw to, abandoning his flesh and bone and blood to the exigencies of the world – to cold and hunger and rough-usage and the crawling fear that he hasn't begun to know how bad things can get. But he doesn't have defenses against this: not against soft sheets on his clean skin and Ian's velvet voice and hour after hour of the relentless building of heat along every nerve and –

\- when Ian takes him again, Orli claws at the sheets and digs his bare heels into the bed, trying desperately for more traction. He arches and twists, his breath sobbing unevenly between clenched teeth. He clutches at Ian, fingers biting deep into the ropey muscles of Ian's shoulders.

"Oh God please fuck Ian God," he begs, and finally _finally_ at the moment of Ian's choosing, Ian withdraws and closes his lube-slick hand around the head of Orli's cock and Orli comes in thick gouts of semen, shaking and sobbing and shivering with relief.

After a couple of hours in bed, Ian tells Orli to get up and get dressed. He doesn't mean Orli's own clothes. There's a few garments hanging in the otherwise empty closet of the guest room: a pair of black drawstring cotton pants, a selection of three gauzy cotton over-shirts. Orli puts the pants on, pulls on one of the shirts without bothering to fasten it, and wanders out to the sunroom.

Orli sprawls in one of the wide wicker armchairs, waiting for the muscles of his back and legs to resolidify out of the mush they've been reduced to by two hours of non-stop fucking. Ian brings him a drink – ice tea, or beer, or orange juice with champagne as the mood takes Ian – and Orli drinks it without comment. Sometimes Ian will hand Orli a book or magazine, and it's Orli's job to turn the pages. Sometimes he just has to sit there, head resting on the chair back, one long leg and naked foot swinging idly. Occasionally Ian has his camera; Orli's posed for punters once or twice before, but nothing like this.

"Orlando," Ian will say from the doorway, and when Orli looks up Ian clicks the shutter, and Orli's captured like that, eyes wide and sharp and faintly guarded, not certain of who or what he's meant to be.

Sometimes Ian will come and lean over him, fruitlessly trying to brush Orli's hair smooth with his hand. Sometimes Ian sits down next to Orli, one hand roaming between the unbuttoned fronts of Orli's shirt and inside the loose hips of Orli's pants. Sometimes – and God bless the guy's fucking energy, Orli thinks – Ian hasn't let himself finish and strips Orli and pulls him across his lap and fucks him one more time to be sure. Orli jerks limp-limbed in Ian's embrace, arousal a reluctant distant blur deep in his guts, incapable of anything except moaning softly against Ian's shoulder.

At one-thirty, Ian dismisses him. Orli goes up stairs, throws the borrowed clothes into the bathroom hamper, cleans up, and pulls his own clothes back on. When he comes down, Ian's waiting in the hall, three crisp new tenners in his hand.

"Same again next week?" Orli asks, accepting the cash.

"Oh, I think so, don't you?" Ian smiles, and Orli ducks his head in affirmation.

Afterwards, walking to the bus with the tendons at the backs of his legs still shaking and his stomach trembling and his arse stinging, Orli resists the urge to step aside and puke into someone's neatly manicured shrubs. Orli knows it makes no sense, and he's not idiot enough to resent his trade with Ian, but the fact remains … Orli comes away from Ian's elegant, sunlit house more shaken than he's emerged from any midnight alleyway.

 _Elijah_

Elijah and Diane have found a sheltered corner in the lee of a couple of trash bins, where they're protected from the chill wind but warmed by the thin spill of autumn sunshine. They're hunkered down side by side, pressed against each other from shoulder to hip to knee, passing a single cigarette back and forth.

When it's not his turn for the smoke, Elijah watches Diane stealthily from the corners of his eyes. She has shoulder-length straw blond hair, and angular, almost harsh features that fascinate Elijah. When she smiles or smirks or smokes, she develops two deeply engraved lines at the corners of her mouth; her lips are pale and matte, and Elijah imagines putting his own lips on them and feeling her mouth fragile and dry and chill under his.

" – wasting it," Diane says sharply.

Elijah flinches guiltily and takes the offered cigarette from her, cupping it inside the cage of his curled fingers and palm. He drags slow and deep, filling his lungs with acrid heat and then streaming a ribbon of smoke from between his pursed lips.

"You're too young to smoke anyway," Diane says, taking the cigarette back promptly.

"Fuck you," Elijah answers mildly, shoving his hands into the opposite armholes of his jacket in an effort to warm them.

"You're too young for that too," she smirks, and the lines at the corners of her mouth spring into relief and the bottom falls out of Elijah's stomach and lands heavily in his groin.

"I'm _four months_ younger than you," Elijah protests.

"You're a boy; boys mature later."

Elijah makes a sour face, unhooks one hand from inside his jacket, and takes the cigarette end from her, squinting at it to estimate how much drag is left before he hits the filter. It seems to him that he's maturing just fine, if maturity means an obsession with other people's skin and a tendency for his blood to relocate violently to his prick at the flimsiest excuse. Elijah's not one for dwelling on the past, but he's almost sure that even a year ago he wasn't wracked by these hair-trigger plunges into sexual arousal.

It's ironic in a way that Elijah's humorous enough to almost appreciate, if it weren't so fucking frustrating. Here he is, fifteen and a half years old, hormones screaming under his skin, two years and two hundred miles away from what passes as parental supervision in his family. He's surrounded by kids not significantly older than he is, all equally adrift from any kind of guidance or control. They know every dead-end alleyway and inadequately boarded up house within a three mile radius, and sex is the best free entertainment they have access to.

And Elijah, baby Elijah, never gets a look in. For one thing, Elijah looks even younger than he is. Orli develops a silky dark beard growth along his jaw-line after a week of neglect, but Elijah's cheeks and chin stay peach smooth from one end of the year to the other. He's grown an inch over the summer, and Orli says there's still time for a sprint to six-foot, but right now Elijah's five-three and pretty sure he's doomed to remain so all his life.

Elijah's astute enough to know it's not just his juvenile physicality that's working against him. There's a hardcore long-term population on the piazza that remembers back to when Orli first found him and brought him here, Elijah three months past his thirteenth birthday but looking like a fey nine year-old. He'd been frozen and starved and half-blind from crying, his clothes soaked and filthy, his face and body still a mass of fading bruises. He'd flinched away in terror from everyone, clinging to Orli's side under the folds of the voluminous old army-coat Orli wore. He remembers trembling in fear when the others told Orli Elijah was too young, too certain to attract the attention of the cops; better to hand him over right away and save trouble later. Elijah remembers digging his face as deep as he could into Orli's fleshless ribcage.

"He's staying," Orli had said flatly, as if no one was more annoyed about it than him, but there it was, and nothing could be done about it.

It's probably hard for those people to remember that was more than two years ago. Elijah's grown up a lot since then, he just hasn't grown much taller.

Diane wasn't there then, of course. Diane only got here at the beginning of the summer.

Elijah figures that when Diane looks at him, she sees a skinny big-eyed kid in grubby clothes, and she can either accept that that's pretty much what he sees when he looks back at her, and they're both too young to be here, and so fucked it's not even funny – or she can tell herself she's older, and a girl, and girls mature faster.

"Hey, there's Orli," Diane says, jerking her sharp little chin to indicate the direction.

"Orli!" Elijah yells, throwing himself onto his feet and running – no _flying_ across the open space.

"Shit!" Orli has time to yell around his laughter, bracing himself for impact as Elijah leaps one-footed onto one of the low wooden benches that dot the piazza and then launches himself at Orli.

There's an explosive huff as the air's knocked out of their lungs and Orli staggers, then rights himself as Elijah swings his feet under himself again and unwinds his arms from around Orli's neck.

"What y'been doing?" Orli asks, messing the front of Elijah's stiffly spiked hair with his hand.

Elijah grimaces and shoves Orli off.

"Hanging."

"Smoking," Orli corrects, leaning in for another whiff of Elijah's breath. "You'll stunt your fuckin' growth man."

"Fuck you," Elijah beams, ducking back in and winding his arm around Orli's waist under Orli's coat. Orli smells of warmth and soap, under the sharper taint of his clothes.

"Come on, I'll buy you a coffee," Orli says, draping his own arm around Elijah's shoulders. "Keep you a fuckin' midget all your life."

"You okay?" Elijah asks quietly, keeping his gaze firmly fixed on Orli's broad hand hanging loosely on the front of Elijah's jacket.

"Why wouldn't I be okay?"

Elijah hesitates.

"I'm fine," Orli says gently. "You don't need to worry. Ian's a nice old guy."

Elijah doesn't answer, but his expression darkens.

Of course Elijah prefers Ian to Orli's other johns. Orli's never come back from Ian with so much as a hickey. On the contrary, Orli comes back clean, his hair in shining curls, his skin silky smooth, his nails round and white-rimmed. For the rest of the day he'll move with loose-limbed laziness, and no matter where they end up spending the night, he'll sleep long and deep. Of course Elijah wants Orli to have Ian in preference to the spur-of-the-moment quick tricks Orli turns to supplement the money he gets from Ian. Elijah hates those bastards, hates them for throwing down a few lousy coins and telling themselves that makes it okay for them to grab Orli and shake him and shove him and push him to his knees. Forcing their tongues and fingers and dicks where they're not _fucking_ wanted. And they're so fucking stupid that even when Orli hangs in their grip like a blank-eyed rag-doll, they don't even fucking know he's not there anymore.

The ones that really scare Elijah, though, are the fucking freaks that like to think they're some kind of high-rollers, offering Orli fifty quid for a couple of hours, and honestly thinking that buys them the right to do whatever the fuck they want to him, short of outright killing him. Orli doesn't take those deals too often, just when Ian's been away for a couple of weeks and it's deep winter and they've seen one hobo too many bagged up and taken away by solemn-faced ambulance men.

"You wanna sleep in tonight?" Orli asks, breaking into Elijah's grim reverie.

"It'll get colder than this," Elijah answers. "We should wait."

"Sensible kid," Orli smiles, pressing the side of his mouth briefly against Elijah's temple.

Elijah ducks his head, looking away to one side. They can never afford to pay for two beds in a hostel; Orli pays for one and later smuggles Elijah in. If the four-bunk room is mostly unoccupied, Elijah helps himself to a place to sleep. If the room's full, as it generally is in cold weather, Orli and Elijah share the narrow mattress, arms wrapped tight around each other so the person furthest from the wall doesn't fall off the edge of the bed.

It doesn't really make any sense, but Elijah would prefer to wait until the scent of Ian's soap fades from Orli's skin before they do that.


End file.
